Architect Booking Software for Phased Projects

Why do architects lose billable hours to scheduling overhead?

A project runs through stages, each needing a different meeting: the initial brief, schematic design, planning consultations, construction review. Lining those up across clients, contractors, and planning officers by email and phone takes hours a week, and every reply that sits unread holds up a decision on the drawings. In Tymeslot you give each meeting category its own booking type, set the notice you need to pull the files and prepare, and let automatic reminders get stakeholders to the meeting ready. Practices working with corporate clients or government bodies that have data-sensitivity terms can self-host the whole thing.

Where generic booking tools fall short for project-based practice

Calendly, Acuity, and Square Appointments are built for one-off transactions: a haircut, a sales demo, a 30-minute discovery call. A practice runs on a long, phased relationship instead. The first feasibility consultation might be a fixed fee, the project kickoff needs a deposit against a multi-month engagement, and design reviews come round every fortnight for the life of the job. None of that fits a generic event type.

The cost lands in two places. Billable hours bleed into unpaid scheduling: at a principal-architect rate of £120 to £180 an hour, three hours a week of inbox coordination is over £20,000 of lost capacity in a year. And momentum stalls whenever a kickoff deposit goes off-platform, because a chased invoice for a fixed-fee feasibility study is days of slippage before drawings can start. Tymeslot closes both gaps. Initial consultations carry a fixed-fee charge collected at booking via Stripe, project kickoffs sit behind a deposit that locks the slot only once payment clears, feasibility studies behave as paid bookings rather than free discovery calls, and self-hosting keeps NDA-bound client and planning-authority data inside the practice's own perimeter.